In lieu of actually writing something interesting (which I haven’t done in a while), I’ve decided to release a 70% done project. It’s called Brand Tags and the idea is simple: You tag brands with the first thing that comes to mind. The idea came to me as I was working on my Brand vs. Utility presentation a few months ago. The thinking went something like this: If brands exist as the sum of all thoughts in someone’s head, then if you ask a bunch of people what a brand is and make a tag cloud, you should have a pretty accurate look at what the brand represents.

What happened after was all a bit of a whirlwind. There are about 30 comments on that post and the experiment ended up getting a lot of press (including an NPR interview, which is still the coolest media moment I’ve ever had). It was exciting and amazing and taught me lots about building a product and how people think about brands.

Two years later things had died down pretty significantly, partly out of my own interest waning and partly out of my inability to keep the scale of responses high without a steady supply of press. At that time I was approached by Ari Jacoby, who was working on a new company called Solve Media, which asked consumers to type in a brand message instead of a bunch of squigly letters in a CAPTCHA. Solve was interested in buying brand tags and was excited about offering up the tagging input across the web as part of it’s CAPTCHA program. I was excited to see my baby get a new life (and, obviously, to also get some money for what I had built).

We struck a deal and I became a shareholder in Solve. I also got some more confidence in my bank account, eventually leading me to make the leap to startup life and Percolate.

Enter Solve, which took some time to think about the best implementation of Brand Tags and then started building up the database of brand descriptions by rolling out this type of Captcha to 0.25% of its Captcha inventory — enough to generate tens of thousands of user-generated responses about a brand a day, Mr. Jacoby said. “We can get an unusually sample size overnight,” he said. The premise of Brand Tags is that a consumer’s perception of a brand is in fact reality, and one that could help measure the effectiveness of brand advertising online.